I don't know about most of the over 300,000 of you registered members, but I live in Chicago and spend a lot of time in transit to and fro via Chicago's public transportation system – CTA. Now, there are a lot of things I could be doing during this time – blogging for MMi (hey, that's actually the full name now – how cute), colorizing comics for my other job, or, God forbid, some homework, but more often than not I'm reading different websites, following the almighty Obama, or worshiping at the feet of Steve. Even with my Mach Five-esque 16GB on 3G there is one thing that always slows me down – ads.

While I was digging around today on the tubes that are the web, I found James's blog post about ad blocking in MobileSafari, 2.0+. Then I found a couple of guys (on a forum we can't link to for legal reasons) who've found out how to block A LOT more ads you'll encounter while surfing with your phone. The process to get this going is ridiculously easy and should be completely painless:

Step One
SSH over to your iPhone (this may work on an iPod Touch as well, but I do not have one to test with, nor do the people who edited this file) and navigate to /etc

Step Two
copy the file called hosts over to your computer for safekeeping <strike>(I recommend sticking it right next to your backed up MobileInstallation file and your custom firmware)</strike>

Step Three
replace the hosts file on your iPhone with the one provided here – the permissions should already be set right, assuming whatever you decompress the zip with doesn't jack with them. If you'd like to be very sure, chmod 644 the file before you replace the original on the phone.

Step Four
reboot

Step Five
Surf ad-free until Apple updates the firmware again, at which point you'll probably have to do this again.

For those curious to how this works, a very extensive list of address to block have been added to the hosts file and when MobileSafari is instructed to load them when you visit a page it, well, doesn't.

If you find some other address to block, follow the format in the file and add them.

This will effect any program that uses the hosts file which means anything that does HTTP connections. You can add these to your computers hosts file and block ads in any browser. On a PC it did strange things to IE when accessing CNN though.

This will effect any program that uses the hosts file which means anything that does HTTP connections. You can add these to your computers hosts file and block ads in any browser. On a PC it did strange things to IE when accessing CNN though.